A Tangled Web

Many states are mass-producing data as a way to hold schools
accountable.

Officials of the Evanston/Skokie, Illinois, school district were not
amused when their schools mistakenly received the lowest rating last
fall on a free World Wide Web site designed to help home buyers. As it
turned out, a computer-programming error had thrown off the
school-rating calculations, which were posted on the official site of
the National Association of Realtors.

The error was quickly corrected, and the well-regarded district,
which is home to Northwestern University, received the site's top
ranking. But the incident dramatizes the perils-and potential-that
await schools and consumers as more groups discover the big business of
customized school data. Web users can easily find any number of sites
when shopping for schools, headhunting for principals and teachers, or
scouting for reform models. "The ability to take and manipulate data is
astronomically greater than it was a few years ago," says John
McLaughlin, president of the Education Industry Group, a Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, company that monitors investment trends in
education-related ventures. "Now, with a $2,000 personal computer and
the right software, you in business."

But as residents of the 7,000-student Evanston/Skokie district can
attest, school data should be eyed with a "buyer beware" mentality.
Data can be available on a reputable site but still not be true. And
accurate information is often easily misinterpreted. Officials at the
College Board in New York City, for example, discourage judging school
quality by SAT scores, the college-entrance exam it sponsors, even
though that data is readily available. "It says nothing about the
quality of the educational tools provided to students," says Janice
Gam, the College Board's associate director of public affairs. One
problem is that the percentage of students taking such tests varies by
school, which in turn affects average scores.

Nevertheless, data packages about schools and districts are a hot
commodity, and one reason is that states are mass-producing information
as part of a national movement to hold schools more accountable for how
well they do their jobs. More school performance information is
available than ever before. And it is easy to obtain. Some 26 states
will post school report cards on the Web by the end of this year. And
there is nothing to stop businesses or nonprofit groups from
repackaging the data for their clients or the public.

Not surprisingly, the availability of all that data has attracted
entrepreneurs. "I see this as a growing business," says Criss Cloudt,
the associate state education commissioner for policy planning and
research in Texas. And though there is potential for misuse, Cloudt
says the concern is outweighed by the public's right to know: "In such
an important business as education, the word must get out."

The largest, and potentially most lucrative, audience for school
data is parents-a fact that has not escaped San Francisco entrepreneur
Steve Rees. In 1997, Rees published a guide to help parents in the San
Francisco Bay area pick between schools in their districts, which
California allows. Last summer, he started School Wise Press hoping to
tap into a broader market. The online service offers free profiles of
California's 8,000 public schools. For $6, parents can get
more-detailed reports of up to 12 pages, with information and
comparisons on enrollment, class sizes, student-to-computer ratios, and
test scores. School Wise Press relies on numbers collected by the
state, but Rees promises to get the data online before the state does.
His Web site gets between 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month.

At least two other California groups provide data for free: Ed-Data,
a coalition of education groups, including the state department of
education; and the nonprofit Great Schools.net, which currently
provides information on schools only in the Bay area but plans to
expand.

As scores of school-data Internet sites crop up nationwide, the most
difficult task may be standing out amid the competition. Packaging the
information in innovative ways helps, but it could also lead to
problems. For example, the Chicago-based National Association of
Realtors rates schools across the nation through its "Find a
Neighborhood" Internet service, which is where the Evanston schools'
error appeared. The manner through which it gets its data appears to be
a tangled web, indeed. NAR is managed by Real Select Inc. of Thousand
Oaks, California. RealSelect, in turn, gets its Internet data on a
variety of neighborhood issues from Taconic Data Corp. of Valhalla, New
York. Taconic gets its school statistics from the San Diego-based
company 2001Beyond and then calculates the school ratings. The ratings
are based on pupil-teacher ratios, SAT and ACT scores, spending, rates
of college-bound students, and the number of National Merit finalists.
(Taconic took responsibility for the Evanston error.)

Another of the nation's leading sources of school data, National
School Reporting Services Inc. of Stamford, Connecticut, plans to
provide data on private and religious schools. It already posts free
reports on public schools on its Web site. The 10-year-old company was
bought last fall by Central Newspapers Inc., a Phoenix-based chain, and
is now part of the company's real estate services branch, Homefair.com.
Meanwhile, SchoolMatch, a research and data firm in Westerville, Ohio,
has decided to add to its data collection. In an effort to get an
"independent analysis," it recently added an online survey on high
schools for parents and students to complete. The survey will
complement the company's school reports, which range in price from $10
to $34 when ordered from its Web site. Jeff Glaze, manager for
consulting services for SchoolMatch, says the company has not yet
decided what it will do with the new survey information.

Though most groups are tapping the surfeit of school information to
peddle data to parents, others are finding some altruistic uses. In
Austin, Texas, the nonprofit agency Just for the Kids has used state
data to compare schools with demographically similar enrollments but
different achievement levels. The group went online last month with
profiles of the state's 2,000 elementary schools.

Academic Management Inc., a business started last fall by former
Texas Deputy Commissioner of Education David Stamman, produces a $150
software package that lets users access and graph several years of data
on schools and districts state wide. Some schools use Stamman's product
to identify similar schools that perform well academically and then
locate job candidates.

Serious users of school information need more than raw
statistics-they also need data on curriculum and school climate, some
education experts say. And that's harder to assemble. Outfits like
SchoolMatch are recognizing this with efforts to collect independent
information. But Russell French, a professor of education at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, argues that state agencies need to
take a role in this as well by joining forces with outside groups in
collecting and reporting such data. This will help to secure more
accurate information by overcoming data-collecting obstacles such as
personnel and funding shortages. And it should help to keep schools,
like those in the Evanston/Skokie district, in the rankings where they
belong.

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